Going Back to Move Forward: Revisiting Childhood Grief

Hi, End Well. I love this conference because there is no small talk. My heaven.

I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. I was born an hour and a half north of here to commercial citrus and avocado growers. My dad was a doctor at our local hospital, and my mom ran the ranch. They also rescued donkeys.

Anytime my dad was at the hospital, we were outside running irrigation lines, spreading fertilizer, and digging in the dirt. It was a magnificent childhood. It was beautiful, strange, and privileged. You really could say that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Until I did.

When I was three and my dad was 42, he was diagnosed with metastatic osteosarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer. It was the early 1980s. He was given a six-month prognosis and told to say goodbye to us.

Instead, he pursued early chemotherapy, radiation, and a leg amputation at the Mayo Clinic. Miraculously, he didn’t die. First, he lived one year. Then two. Then three.

But he had recurrences the whole time. We lived between scans. We lived as though there were an executioner’s axe hanging over our dinner table, and we didn’t know when it would fall.

His scans would often reveal something new: a neck tumor here, a leg tumor there, another tumor in his knee. Then he would go in for more treatment. It was like a sinister version of The Giving Tree, only he was trading body parts for time with us.

When I was 11, the cancer came back, and he knew it was for good. That was when he decided he was going to train my brother and me for a time without him.

While other kids were riding their bikes after school or having playdates, my brother and I were in my dad’s version of survival school. It was very specific to the things he thought we would need to survive without him.

Understanding the Dewey Decimal System has not helped me at all. Memorizing the member nations of the United Nations has helped me a little more. He taught us about the role of nitrogen in soil health, how to scratch a man’s eyes out if I was ever attacked, how to beat a man at pool, which I’m still working on, and how to fix a carburetor.

There were so many of these lessons.

He also did a number of things to remain present for us after he was gone, because he knew that would happen sooner rather than later. He planted trees around the ranch because he knew they would feed and shade us after he died.

Even though I was only 11, he bought a flock of doves, built them a little coop, and put my brother in charge of them. He said, “You have to take care of these until your sister gets married one day, hopefully a long time from now.”

He also became a beekeeper. He knew honey didn’t spoil. He knew the ancient Egyptians had used it as a natural antibiotic. He put away honey so that we would be able to stir it into our tea, even to this day.

Throughout it all, I knew he was suffering. I knew he was often in terrible pain, but he would not talk about it. He wouldn’t let us see him in the hospital. During the many years he was sick, I never saw him as a quote-unquote patient, although I saw him suffer all the time.

If any of us, or any friend or member of our community, expressed anything resembling empathy, he would become angry. For him, empathy and pity were the same thing.

Watching that from the beginning of my childhood through adolescence, I started to learn that being strong meant being invulnerable. It meant hiding whatever pain or suffering I felt because showing it would be a betrayal of him.

Here was this person sacrificing everything just to remain around long enough to teach me how to change a hose bib.

Our family line was, “You are privileged. You are blessed.” That was 100 percent true. But the second part was, “You had better work very damn hard to take advantage of the advantages you have been given.”

So I did.

I took all my fears and anxieties and threw them into schoolwork, after-school activities, and anything that would keep me from feeling my own worry or concern.

My dad said he would stay alive for as long as he could enjoy his life with my mom, my brother, and me. Then, when he couldn’t, he would die.

I took this entirely at face value until one day when I was 16. By then, he had lived for 13 years with metastatic bone cancer.

I was painting my nails with some friends and went into my parents’ bathroom cabinet looking for nail polish remover. I found an unmarked pill bottle with a handwritten note wrapped around it containing dosage instructions.

I immediately knew that my dad had a terminal prescription. This was it. He had a plan. There was a level of suffering he was unwilling to endure. That was what he had meant when he had been saying this my entire life.

I wasn’t angry. I completely understood. I was scared, certainly, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to say anything. Saying something would have been another kind of betrayal.

So I said nothing. I put it back where I found it and tried to pretend I didn’t know.

Six months later, we were on the phone and got into a big fight. It was stupid. He wanted me to complete my college applications earlier than I wanted to, and I was mad.

I hung up on him. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say, “I love you.” I just remember the ka-chunk of hanging up the phone as hard as I could.

I didn’t know it, but that day he was about to take his lethal medication. By the time I got home, he was unconscious. I would never hear his voice again.

I dealt with his death by chasing academic honors like a drug. I played Division I college sports until I stopped getting my period.

I threw myself at life and into life in a way that I’m not going to say I regret, but it was exhausting. I took his hopes and dreams for me and lived as though they were a to-do list rather than things I was supposed to enjoy.

I wrote a book. I earned my PhD. By my mid-thirties, I was absolutely exhausted.

I had spent my entire adult life trying to prove that I was good, because someone who is good is not someone who hangs up on her dying dad.

I was trying to use achievement, and all the nice things that come with it, like a drug. Like an anesthetic for all the difficult feelings I didn’t want to admit were there: shame, regret, and guilt.

I hate to say it, but you cannot kill shame, regret, and guilt with overwork and avoidance. Mine came back with a vengeance.

On the outside, I was successful and thriving. On the inside, I was questioning my worth. I was anxious and scared.

I didn’t want to keep living like this. I couldn’t keep living like this.

I decided I wanted to change. But how on earth do you do that?

I’m a writer and a researcher, so I set out to interview many of the grief specialists who are in this room. It was always hypothetical: “What would you do if…?”

But I started doing some of the work. I did everything they told me because my coping mechanism was still being a goodie two-shoes.

I even went into the wilderness with no food and no tent to do something that scared me: to be alone with my thoughts and feelings, including the ones I found most uncomfortable, with nothing to distract me from them.

I became very bored, very dirty, and very much in need of coffee.

I realized that what scared me most wasn’t even my most negative feelings. It was love.

Love is the gateway to negative feelings because you can lose it. I hate love. I hate caring about anyone or anything.

I knew that couldn’t stand. I wanted to live the kind of life my dad had actually wanted for me: a big, brave one. To do that, I was going to need to understand that courage looked different.

I heard about a grief-support organization for children and became a volunteer facilitator. It’s called Josie’s Place, and it’s in San Francisco. It’s a wonderful organization.

I immediately felt less alone because I walked in and saw that all these children thought they were bad too. So many had been out of the room playing when their mother died. Some had said something in anger to a parent that they regretted. They blamed themselves.

I could see, looking at them, that the terrible things that had happened were not their fault. Because I could see that, I began to understand that what had happened to me might not have been my fault either.

The children were doing something I think many of us do. It is easier to blame yourself, even though that is painful and uncomfortable, than to admit that bad things can happen for no reason at all.

The children taught me some of the most important lessons from what became a seven-year project and period of my life.

They taught me that the worst thing you can do when you’re sad is try not to be sad. That sounds basic, but I had spent years trying not to pay attention to sadness.

They also taught me that feeling guilty does not necessarily mean you did something wrong. Feeling regret does not necessarily mean you should have acted differently.

Here I was, learning all these things. But life is nothing if not a sushi conveyor belt of things that are going to test you and teach you at the same damn time.

First, I lost my dad. Then we lost our family home to a wildfire.

We didn’t just lose the house and a third of our trees. We lost everything my dad had worked so hard to prepare and save for us.

Two years after that, I lost my mom, also to cancer, but quickly this time. She chose the right to die too.

Because of the experience we had with my dad, we vowed that this time would be completely different. No one would be left wondering whether they had messed up, whether she knew how they really felt, or whether she understood how much she had meant to them.

We decided to hold a kind of goodbye, send-off, or living memorial for her, whatever you want to call it. We each took turns telling her how much she had meant to us and to our lives. We wished her a good journey and told her what we hoped for her.

It hurt like the dickens. It was also so beautiful.

If you can swing it, everyone deserves a chance to say goodbye and good luck.

I learned through this process that death is a doorway, not a destination.

No matter what you believe about the afterlife, as soon as you die, you immediately begin becoming something else, another form of life.

I saw this up close. A year after my mom died, we decided to spread her ashes over the lemon orchards she had planted 45 years earlier.

We used our friend’s crop duster, the same kind of plane we use to fertilize or spray the trees. We had to mix her with a 10-pound bag of Gold Medal flour because human remains are not visible enough from an airplane, which is a fact I never thought I would need to know.

Her ashes were spread over the trees and soil. They were pulled into the roots of the trees and incorporated into the lemons.

Because we eat those lemons, they became us too.

Actually, if you shop at Safeway, maybe they became you too. Don’t tell the USDA.

By spending so many years of my late teens and early adulthood trying to outrun or outwork my negative feelings, I missed a very important lesson.

You cannot have joy without pain. You cannot have bravery without fear. You cannot have resilience without challenges. You cannot have life without death.

These things are not opposites. They are partners.

It is never too late to remember that every heart is a phoenix, being born from the ashes of what we love again and again and again.

Thank you.